October 31, 2013

October 25, 2013

event review: best of the 2013 nw animation fest

by sven at 4:43 pm

Our Best of the 2013 NW Animation Fest event took place on Saturday Sept 7 at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. It repeated one week later on Sept 14 at the Bijou Metro in Eugene. Here's a short review-in-photos that I created for the NWAF Facebook page.

1. We're proud to have been up on the Hollywood Theatre﻿'s beautiful new marquee just two days after the grand unveiling ceremony.

July 14, 2013

women in animation 2013

by sven at 1:56 pm

While putting films in sequence for this year's NW Animation Fest, I was struck by the scarcity of female characters. Because gender interests me, I decided to throw together some quick statistics to study what's going on.

My data set consists of the 154 films that were selected for screening at our 2013 festival. Here's what I found:

BYLINE
(In the program, who did we list on the film's "created by" line?)
66% Male
19% Female
15% both / name of studio only

GROUP BYLINES
(creators of more than one gender listed, or name of studio only)
83% Male protagonist
13% Female protagonist
4% abstract, or gender of protagonist is unidentifiable

What I see here is that when women make a film, they create female protagonists about 1/2 the time. But when men make films, they create male protagonists about 3/4 the time. Group projects feature male protagonists about 4/5 the time.

It seems intuitive that artists would have a bias toward creating protagonists that look like themselves. But this is not really the case. Women seem to have a fairly egalitarian interest in both men and women. Men, in contrast, tend to take a male-identified point of view.

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